[Mb-civic] The return of the trees - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The return of the trees

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  April 1, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

DURING A journalism conference in Milwaukee in the summer of 2002, I 
took some colleagues to a soul food restaurant on the block I grew up 
on. We walked the block after dinner. It was a warm Thursday night. 
Children darted off porches. Mothers chatted on steps. Men conversed as 
they leaned on cars. All around, there was laughter and music. This was 
part of the the black north side, which since my departure in 1976 has 
been battered by the loss of factory jobs and some nationally noted murders.

One of my colleagues, a New York newspaper columnist who has a home in 
Harlem, asked, ''This is the inner city?" The running children were 
bathed by dapples and flickers of street-lamp light filtering through 
the trees. I looked up. Then it hit me.

The tree canopy was back.

Massive Dutch elm trees were at the root, pun intended, of much joy on 
this block in the early 1960s. The immense crowns arched from tree to 
tree, creating a deep shade that kept us cool on the hottest days. They 
invited long games of hopscotch, two-square and ''Captain, May I?" The 
yard-thick trunks were used for hide and seek. When we were done 
playing, we plopped our backs down on the grass kept cool by the shade. 
At night, we tracked lightning bugs as mothers talked on the porches. 
The trees, by promoting community with their coolness by day, provided a 
leafy security blanket at night.

Unbeknownst to me, as I lived on the north side, there was a man on the 
south side of Milwaukee who had very similar memories. His name is Bob 
McFadyen. He grew up to be Milwaukee's forestry services manager.

''We had a tree where the shade filled our whole lawn," McFadyen told me 
in 2004. He retired last fall. ''We had fireflies all over the place, 
too. I recently looked at some old photographs of Milwaukee as it looked 
in 1914. There were so many trees in the photos of city blocks that it 
looked like this city was carved out of the forest."

The city had to carve out the forest as Dutch elm disease tore through 
the city. Milwaukee removed 128,000 Dutch elms between 1956 and 1988. 
Milwaukee went from having over 20 percent of its streets covered by 
canopies to virtually nothing. Without the trees, summer heat reflected 
brutally off concrete. Children retreated from the congregational 
sidewalk to individual porches. Lightning bugs, deprived of the 
post-leaf raking debris they need to regenerate, dimmed into memory. 
''It was so hot, people spent more time indoors," McFadyen said of his 
neighborhood as well.

But even as Milwaukee took away the elms, it had foresight. It had an 
urban forestry program that received national awards, was cited by the 
New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Daily News, 
and was called ''the best in the country" by James Kielbaso, a forestry 
professor at Michigan State University and a former president of the 
International Society of Arboriculture.

The city replaced the elms with skinny maple trees. Nearly four decades 
later, the canopy has recovered from virtually nothing to 16 percent, 
according to American Forests and is closing back in on 20 percent, 
according to Milwaukee's environmental services superintendent, Preston 
Cole. ''In lots of cities, it's hard to argue for the support of trees 
with all the hue and cry for police and fire services," Cole said. ''But 
our electorate here is pretty savvy. We know we can't walk away from our 
200,000 trees."

Indeed, the value of urban trees has become clear in recent years. 
Studies show they lower storm runoff problems. A 1997 study by the 
University of Illinois showed that crime in a housing project was 
significantly less and community bonds were stronger on tree-lined parts 
of the project than on barren parts. Such considerations have not been 
lost on people here in Boston as local urban foresters figure out what 
to do about the hundreds of majestic 150-to-200-year-old oak trees of 
Franklin Park that will die in the coming years. Boston's director of 
historic parks, Margaret Dyson, recently said, ''It's part of this 
community, these woods."

The woods are more than that. They help make the community possible.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/01/the_returnof_the_trees/
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